I think I know why MSSR is depicting Linux as a end of line OS: I hear MS has a beta of an operating system, has been in the works for a loong time (beta 1.0 came shortly after the first Mac). One of these days it will be good for release. Possibly.

Yuri: what's the difference between microsoft and russia?Sasha: One's a ruthless totalitarian empire bent on world domination, with millions of informers, riddled with organized crime.The other's a computer company.

Yuri: what's the difference between microsoft and russia?Sasha: One's a ruthless totalitarian empire bent on world domination, with millions of informers, riddled with organized crime.The other's a computer company.

I knew they had privatized everything when the Soviet Union fell, but this is ridiculous!

Did you miss the part where it says the dude is a Microsoft employee? He's a capitalist, not a socialist. Not that the facts have ever stopped you from making cracks about your imaginary version of socialism.

We do want socialism in the US. Look at medicare, medicaid, the military, police, fire departments, public schools, public libraries, public roads, social security, the list of popular socialist endeavors is quite long.

Money is the 'product of your body?!?' You crap money? Amazing. Money is a social construct, meaningless without social agreement. The ability to amass and preserve a surplus is not an individual ability, it is an emergent phenomenon enabled by the agreement of a society to honor money. Without society, money is meaningless.

In a true socialist state, no one can force anyone to do anything, unlike a capitalist state, where those with capital control and dom

All societies force you to share the products of your labor. It is the cost of membership. You are paying for the benefit of being a part of society. Libertarians want the benefits, but they don't want to pay for it.

If you don't pay, you don't get to be a member. If you don't like the deal offered by one society, do what you do in the free market: shop around. No one I know goes into a McDonald's, asks for a Whopper, offers to pay $0 for it, then gets incensed and starts whining about their rights being inf

It means different things in America than in the rest of the word, where it is just another term for 'anarchist.' Here in America, it means "Individualist free market anarchist," and implies a belief in absolute property rights.

I would wager that I know quite a bit more about libertarians and the history and philosophy of anarchism than you do, in fact, it is because I know what anarchism is that I hate libertarians. American libertarians are basically nothing more than closet fascists.

Wrong, as I explained, labor doesn't get you a portable, tradable, universal, and everlasting unit of wealth exchange, it gets you products.

Here's capitalism: A man knocks on your door with an offer, you get to continue top breath his air and eat his food if you suck his cock.

It is not stealing if you get something in return, and you freely accept the exchange. If you don't like what is offered by society, don't live in society. You have the choice not to play, you can live as a hermit and no one will bothe

First, about the Amish: you don't need to deal with money to be required to pay money to the government for taxes. Even if you use the barter system for everything, the IRS requires you to pay taxes based on the market value of the goods and services you trade. So, for instance, if you agree with your neighbor to fix his car in exchange for him mowing your lawn for a month, you and he both are required to determine the Dollar amount this transaction is worth, and count it as income on both your tax returns, and pay taxes on it. Of course, in reality, no one does that, but the law is the law. It's easy for people working normal jobs to get away with not reporting this stuff, since they already have tons of thousands of dollars in regular W-4 income, but if someone appears to be making a good living (like with a farm), but isn't reporting any income or paying any taxes, the IRS generally takes a dim view of that. How (or if) the Amish get away with not paying taxes, I have no idea.

Now for the rest of your argument, it makes no sense. You're talking about some kind of exchange for living in society; what exchange are you talking about? The previous poster was talking about the common criticism of Marxism which is that everyone seems to receive the same income (or at least some guaranteed minimum income), whether or not they feel like working, and that this system is unsustainable. What is your response to that charge?

And then of course you go off on some nonsensical rant about capitalism and fellatio. Sorry, but that's not capitalism at all; capitalism is when people are able to control capital and use it to invest in industry. Of course, in the most successful capitalist societies (which I would argue are the Western European nations), there's strong governmental controls over the market to make sure that things don't get out of control, and companies aren't allowed to grow too large and become too powerful. Capitalism and free-market economies work best when the playing field is level, so to speak, companies aren't allowed to grow too large and powerful, and the rules are tilted in favor of smaller competitors rather than larger incumbents.

The Soviet experiment showed why Marxism and planned centralized economies simply don't work, and North Korea is still trying to make it work, to no avail. China however gave up on it, and now that they have a free(r) market, they're quite successful, even though they never gave up the authoritarian government part.

The previous poster was talking about the common criticism of Marxism which is that everyone seems to receive the same income (or at least some guaranteed minimum income), whether or not they feel like working, and that this system is unsustainable. What is your response to that charge?

I'll just offer a short answer to this question.

The premise is that people fundamentally want to work, that most of what people do when they're not sleeping is a form of work, and people dislike their jobs because of poor conditions and their lack of real influence over the results of their labor (i.e., alienation).

Secondarily, people respond to social norms; ever feel uncomfortable taking a break around people who are working?

If there were some minimum income, there would doubtless be freeloaders, despite

That's not what the previous poster was talking about, or else he's an idiot. There is no choice to not pay taxes in any industrialized country I've ever heard of, unless you're on the dole or similar (but even then, you're still "playing" and a part of the system).

No, you can't live as a hermit, not legally any way. Living as a hermit implies moving to some rural area and living on the land there. That's only legal if you own the land, and if you own the land, you have to pay property taxes to continue

In a pure Capitalist state, anyone with property dominates, controls, and enslaves anyone without income producing property. Libertarians define aggression as a poor man stealing an apple from a rich man, but when the rich man offers the poor man an apple in exchange for a life of slavery, that is a fair deal.

When your life is on the line, any deal is a fair deal. Libertarians don't want people to band together to protect themselves from oppression, they want the powerful to be free to oppress the weak. Lib

Regular folks emphatically do not like capitalism better. The poster boys for capitalism, Wall Street CEOs, are amongst the most loathed figures on the world scene today. And in any case, do try to compare apples to apples. People in first world European socialist democracies wouldn't trade places with Americans for anything, most of the world looks at us as ruthless barbarians who don't give a fuck about the poor. but more and more Americans are emigrating to these socialist democracies. Now, try to find m

What about all the other socialist services you enjoy, such as roads and highways, food inspections, parks, etc.? Should those be eliminated too? Good luck inspecting your own food before buying it. I guess you can just have your family sue the grocery store after you die of food poisoning, or maybe we'll just rely on word-of-mouth getting around and the grocery store selling tainted meat going out of business after a few hundred people die.

Windows retains a lot of very insecure backwards compatibility cruft (eg lanman hash types to cite just one example)... Linux is far better in that regard..

It was NT which was the ground up rewrite, but although NT provided a new kernel they bolted a lot of the existing legacy cruft on top of it, many of the security holes in windows are a result of weaknesses in (or as a direct result of) this cruft rather than the core NT kernel.

It's pretty brazen of you to imply that Windows is less secure than Linux. Put a desktop distro on linux and connect it to the internet, give it Window's marketshare and watch hackers make swiss cheese of it.

LOL. Where do all these 'there is no difference in security between operating system' trolls come from?

Wasn't Ubuntu pulled from OS cracking contests recently because it was too hard to crack when compared to Windows and MacOS?

In the PWN2OWN competition in 2008, attackers were able to crack the OSX and Vista laptops, but no one succeeded in breaking into the Ubuntu machine. There weren't any Linux targets in 2009 or 2010 (it looks like the focus shifted more toward web browser vulnerabilities anyhow).

What kind of reasoning is that? Sounds like a very elite hacking contest...

If the 'elite hackers' can break into Windows and MacOS but not Ubuntu, that should tell you something.

Besides, there have been countless amount of Linux hacks and exploits.

No there haven't:

a) the number is clearly countable.b) the number is far, far less than the number of Windows hacks and exploits.c) the Linux exploits are generally fixed much faster: my Ubuntu machines are normally patched automatically before the exploit hits the media.d) Windows has staggering amounts of insecure backwards compatibility crud which guarantees security holes. For example, including the current directory on the DLL search path by default... that is quite simply insane, but Microsoft won't change it in case they break WhizzbangSoft-95 and those users complain about it.

Sorry, but thats nonsense. It's the old argument o proportions. The Linux kernel is not as perfect as the BSD kernel:P but its by far more modular, open source (so those hackers could start right away) and witten with a different methodology in mind. Also there were no time constraints but lots of hackers and gifted coders around the globe that took their time to write something they would like. That's in sharp contrast to the thing a company has to do to pay its employees. In case you still don't believe

By your logic, marketshare % == hacking attempts %. You do realize that many servers run Linux right? According to Forrester Research 48% of businesses surveyed used OSS. If Linux represents even half of that then at least 24% of businesses use Linux. That would mean 24% of all exploits would have to be targetting Linux. Funny I don't see 24% of botnets being written for Linux. The vast, vast majority are written for Windows.

Also hackers do it for the glory or for money. If they are after money, then they would target financial institutions. Also they attack the weakest point. So far hackers target customers of these institution who use Windows, not the servers themselves that use Linux or Unix or whatever. Maybe because Linux servers are harder to compromise than Windows desktops?

By your logic, linux on the server is as easily exploitable as linux on the desktop. Last time I checked, server-side linux isn't running a web browser with Java and flash plug-ins, OpenOffice, or many of the other desktop-centric things that make it more open to attack.The common theme in the replies here is that linux on the server side is secure. No shit. Go read my original response and you'll notice I made it a point to say "Desktop."

Attacked a lot? Sure. compromised a lot? No. Barely ever. The only common Linux attacks are just scripts that check the system for default passwords. There are other attacks but they are extremely rare.

I mean, it happens, but it is so damn rare to come across an infected Linux (or any Unix or Unix-like OS) machine that you might as well also claim that women give birth to sextuplets "a lot" as well.

That's the same old argument that has been variously applied to Linux, BSD, and Macs. At least in the Linux world, it doesn't hold water, since the code is subject to so many more eyes. And in the case of an exploitable bug, a patch is usually available within a few hours, not weeks, as on a "patch Tuesday" system.

Additionally, Linux (via distributions) updates all of the software on a system from one location. Windows is getting there (Windows Update), but still has a way to go (Flash, Reader, and Java upd

>>>And what percentage of Windows 95 (a ground-up rewrite, from what I understand) remains now?

None. Because Windows 7 is part of the new NT line (3.1, 4.x, 5.x, 6.x) while Win95/98/m.e. were part of the old MS-DOS line that microsoft terminated.

The real question is: What percentage of the original NT 3.1 still remains, and the answer is probably "a lot" due to the need for backwards-compatibility with old apps (like Office 1995/97, or IE 5/6), as demanded by business customers. Don't know what

Windows 95 was an updated GUI running on DOS. You must be thinking of something else.

Lessee... Windows NT 3.1 was the Windows 3.1 GUI running on a new (NT) kernel.

("New" is relative, as NT was created by a bunch of VMS coders, from which it gets message passing and other features. One could argue somewhat whimsically that Dos-based Windows up to ME was based on 1981 technology, and every Windows version since then was based on 1975 technology.)

NT 3.51 would be called a service pack today. It was pretty solid for the time.

Windows NT 4.0 was the NT 3.5 core with a GUI that looked more like Windows 95.

Windows 2000 (still my favorite Windows desktop for business use) was basically a huge service pack on NT 4.

Windows XP was a substantial update of 2000, but by no means a "ground up" rewrite.

Vista started as a "ground up" rewrite (Longhorn) but was plagued by project delays and restarts. I'm not certain, but I wouldn't be surprised at all that what actually made it to GA had a substantial amount of XP code.

Then there's discussions on thunking and code reuse and backwards compatibility...

I'm by no means an expert, but I don't think that Windows has ever had a complete bare-metal ground-up rewrite.

Nope, WOW was part of WIndows 95, and allowed 16-bit Windows 3.1 apps to run on the 32-bit OS. Sure, Microsoft applied the desktop shell improvements to both product lines in parallel, but the desktop shell has never really been the problem with Windows. The real backwards compatibility comes from Win32 - allowing user-mode code to use the same systems library with either kernel. Basically everything you can call the OS, from the kernel up through the implementation of the systems libraries, was different between NT and Win9x.

If you just want to argue that the new OS was backwards compatible for apps with the old one, sure - that's true. It's also why Windows won. People like thier apps.

Windows NT was released in 1993, 2 years before Windows 9x. So it's not really possible for it to have been a port of 9x. In reality, the guys that wrote the 9x UI were NT guys who were on loan to the 9x team. They had intended to write the UI for NT (then code named Cairo) but 9x got higher priority due to the need to bridge the dos/nt barrier with app and driver compatibility.

I asked where he got my information and why he was calling me. I had not used any of those services for over 8 years. He told me that a company was looking for a VB coder and I replied, "I don't do that anymore," to which he replied, "I know! Nobody does. That's why I dug back this far in our history to find someone with experience."

Don't they? Einstein was one of the smartest men who ever lived, and his writings are filled with tons of mis-spellings..... not because he was dumb but just because he wrote so quickly that he made mistakes. Ditto a friend of mine who has a Ph.D. in engineering science... he has a nasty habit or writing words without the "silent e" at the end. "writ" instead of "write"

No, he's absolutely correct: Linux is scheduled for EOL in 2011, and even now Linus is only patching critical security bugs (we'll still probably see at least a few of those every Linux Patch Tuesday until EOL, and frankly I'll be happy to see my last LPT). And look, there hasn't been a major update since Linux SP4 in 2006, and he stopped active development of Linux's integrated web browser, Firefox, years ago, so it's not like we weren't warned. I'm not sure what everyone here is complaining about - sure,

The use of Dash as the default shell over Bash, the growing preference for cmake over GNU Make, and the speedy progress of Clang against GCC mean that the GNU toolchain is not invulnerable. Even if they still have a few years on the competition in most areas, I think GNU needs to start thinking now about how to maintain its relevance in the long term.

I quite like autotools, actually. If you actually think about what you're doing when writing your configure.ac [gpleda.org] and M4 macros [gpleda.org], it's an elegant, clean and easy to understand solution.

Unfortunately, at the moment it seems fashionable to throw all the configuration macros into a single, poorly commented file, with all the code copied and pasted from other projects with little understanding demonstrated of what it does or why it does it, with the predictable poor performance and low maintainability.

I hear this idiocy all the time on IRC. When it happens, I ask if the person if they actually know how to use autotools. The answer is *always* no. Usually with a justification like "why would I want to learn a system that sucks?"

You gave zero reasons for bashing autotools, so I put you in this same camp. Back up your assertions or GTFO.

It is actually a handy piece of software. When used properly, most projects need just one or two macros - AC_CHECK_LIB and AC_CHECK_HEADERS and then just list out your sources and flags in a Makefile.am.

There's really very little to complain about. It does it's job, does it fairly well. The only catch is that you have to RTFM.

Quite honestly, I don't have much experience with autotools. There are two reasons: what little I've seen looks, at first glance, as a nightmare, and, as a user, the experience is horrible. Specifically, autotools is slow. These days I spend more time./configuring than I do actually compiling, especially with distcc (./configure not being parallelizable). Even worse, sometimes I need to rebuild all of the scripts due to some patch, and that adds even more time to an already ridiculously inefficient process. I mean, seriously, why do I need to check for a C compiler, determine the maximum length of commandline arguments, and figure out if I have 20 system headers and 30 libc functions every time I want to compile a package?

Meanwhile, CMake is a hell of a lot faster, uses a more modern language, and can integrate better with other build environments. I've used CMake for a couple of projects and, although the language does have its quirks, it's mostly been smooth sailing. Where I don't use/need CMake, I use simple Makefiles.

So no, I'm not in a position of familiarity with both systems to be able to do a detailed objective comparison as a developer, but as a user I can clearly say CMake is much superior (at least the way it is used by actual projects), and as a developer I can at least say CMake is nice. Several large projects have migrated from autotools to CMake, and I bet they had a good reason.

Meanwhile, most small projects using autotools only appear to be using them because "it's what everyone else uses" and don't really understand them. Maybe autotools is great if you're an autotools guru, but it's still slow, and most people aren't going to invest the time to properly learn a system based on arcane tools. As far as I'm concerned, it's the CVS of build systems - sure, it kind of works works, but honestly, I'd rather either use a modern DVCS or stick with tarballs and patches (bare Makefiles).

Here's what is good about autotools: 'make dist',./configure --enable-XXX, and easy integration with debhelper and rpmbuild.

I've got a small ~60kloc project [sf.net] out there that I started out using a simple makefile and C code, and then later migrated to gettext and autotools. I really wish in hindsight that I had just started with GNU Hello World and gettext from the get-go and then built out my project. As it was, I spent days re-factoring strings for gettext and more days getting my configure.ac and Makefi

It doesn't have to...GNU is not about dominance, it is about ensuring software freedom. GNU was a plan to replace proprietary tools with open equivalents, the fact that these open equivalents are now being replaced with superior open equivalents is irrelevant.

I doubt RMS's primary goal is that everyone use GNU software, rather that everyone should use open source software regardless of who wrote it or where it came from, providing its users have the freedoms granted by the GPL (or a great level, eg BSD).

You tenderfoots and your DASHES and CLANGS... you unwittingly believe that your new tools are so sexy and shiny, giggling and chuckling with your hippo dancing jokes. These tools are an abomination and a sacrilege. REPENT! The filthy whores of Babylon such is Apple may give you honey, they may give you mead now - but in the end you will be left in sorrow, pennyless. She will take your GNU purity and defile it and you will rend your clothes and mourn when you realize the extent of your filth.

Bash is (as POSIX shells go) very full-featured with a bunch of enhancements (nonstandard extensions) for use in scripting and various niceties for interactive use. It's one of several shells these days that are commonly accepted as good choices for login shells.

However, quite a lot of shell scripts on a typical system don't need or use bash extensions. (And Debian policy is that shell scripts that are interpreted with/bin/sh should not use any

That's not a bad thing. In a lot of the classic software development models, the "end" state of a software's life cycle was operations and maintenance (O&M). Which is to say you have no new requirements having fulfilled all the basic requirements. It's bad if you constantly need new features but sometimes it can be an indication that the software is mature or near complete. At this point the customer only ever pays you money to put it back into development or fix/improve something small.

I would agree that the 2.6 kernel series is very robust [wikipedia.org] and something we will most likely use for quite sometime. But I would always shy from ever saying that an operating system has all the major features it could ever need. I mean, I know a lot of clients that are committed to some version of the 2.6 kernel in their server rooms and would only ever update if there was a necessary security flaw or performance feature [slashdot.org] that they could not live without. For a lot of them, Linux has provided all the web server or database hosting features they would ever need and the product of "Linux" is indeed in the final phase of its life cycle. The vast majority of their patches are to Apache, Postgres, etc.

Yeah, I really don't know what this guy meant, but it's worth noting that being at the end of a life cycle generally also means you're at the beginning. That's why it's called a "life cycle" and not a "life timeline". The end of the cycle is when you start over.

So to me, if you say that a piece of software is "at the end of its life cycle", I read that as, "This software is complete. Time to start working on the next version."

Your interpretation of "life cycle" is entirely reasonable, but it's not what MBA types mean when they use the phrase. Business schools teach all kinds of subtle warping of the language (any language: English, Russian, whatever.) The bizspeak meaning of "at the end of its life cycle" is "this is Old And Busted and we can't make any money off it -- check out our New Hotness!"

If we've now got to the point where Linux (and windows, too by the look of it) are really just in maintenance mode: with all the features pretty much in place and mere "tick-over" releases to fix a few bugs and support new hardware - where do we go from here?

Will our desktops look the same in 20 years time as they do now (and did, to a large extent 20 years ago - certainly for windows). Will we still be running x86-based hardware - albeit with solid-state mass storage instead of spinning stuff? If so, the

I'm not one of those people who mindlessly bashes on Microsoft for being Microsoft. But what I see here is the president of a Microsoft branch saying one of their competitors is dying. Specifically a competitor for, essentially, a government contract.

"We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is at the end of its life cycle."

could also be:"We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is deprecated""We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is obsolete""We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is old fashioned"

Does anyone have the exact translation for what the guy really meant or just a Google translation.

Also, of course it's off-the-cuff. A Microsoft guy saying nothing more than "Linux is [i]x[/i]" with nothing more to back up the statement or shed more light on it.

I have to second this. My girlfriend is trilingual and is a professional translator. She jokes with her coworkers at how bad online automated translations are.
Take a look at funnytranslator.com. After 30 online translations the phrase:
"We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is at the end of its life cycle."
becomes:
"The Linux Caozuojitong what life in Russia, you know."

Take a look at funnytranslator.com. After 30 online translations the phrase: "We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is at the end of its life cycle." becomes: "The Linux Caozuojitong what life in Russia, you know.

Your girlfriend should know better than to evaluate a translation system based on a series of repeated translations.

Translation, whether it is done by a human or a machine, always involves trade-offs. One of the most important trade-offs is between fluency and faithfuln

Yes, he did literally say "end of life cycle". Most probably because in modern Russian corporate-speak expressions and terms like this are direct translations from English (in the same way 300 to 100 years ago they were borrowed from French:) ).

I have no trouble believing that the translation is accurate, because it sounds exactly like the kind of thing you'd expect an English-speaking Microsoft exec to say. Bizspeak is a universal language: MBAs around the world spout the same meaningless crap no matter what language it sounds like they're speaking.

Yes, but OS X is based largely on the same paradigms. Windows? It's command line structure has been around for nearly 30 years now. It's basic GUI concepts have been around about 20, and it's whole interface (a taskbar with a menu button on the left, open applications in the middle, and a clock + resident apps on the right) has been around for 15 years now.

When you really get down to the nitty gritty, desktop OS's have just be doing slow evolution over time - and that's not really a bad thing. The syste

Divesting something only means creating a harder time competing for all relevant parties . The operating systems that are popular on clients also tend to be popular on servers. They're all based around Linux technology. We happen to build our server business on Windows technology. It creates dis-synergy in fact to split our server and enterprise business from our client business.

Really, this is the kind of remark best ignored rather than obsessing or getting upset over. Company execs talk nonsense all the time. I mean what do you expect him to day "Oh dear, this new OS will cut into our sales, as Linux has been doing and will continue doing for the foreseeable future"? Didn't think so.

Most of these Microsoft people believe their own FUD. They'll argue that the sun is the moon to discredit alternatives. One of the best that I've heard from someone I used to think highly of is that "Windows has far more security mechanisms in place than Unix"

I think that part of the driving force for the attitude among Microsoft enthusiasts is that they are scared of change. They are happy in their safe little world (safe, in terms of job security etc.) and it makes them angry that better systems exist and people are taking an interest in them.

Note that I'm an MCSE (Microsoft Certified Solitaire Engineer) but please don't hold that against me:-)

There's also the infatuation people have with wealth and power. Microsoft infuses everything with vast hype and very expensive, flashy, and overwhelming marketing, and most people are hopelessly dazzled by it. Bill Gates is or was Forbes' richest man for years, and people fall into an emotional transference trap by concluding that this makes him some kind of a wise sage who can do no wrong, and the magic is generalized to everything he touches. It is superstition and tribalism deep within our subconscious pulled back out with the most powerful force known to man: money.

It is sad, it is pathetic, it is moronic, it is self-destructive, but it is.

All open source projects evolve to the point where the current developers want to throw away all the code and start again.

Ask the KDE4 guys how's that working out for them.

Meanwhile, it's an interesting point. In the closed source world the justification for keeping ancient shit code is that "we have too much money in it to throw it away"; open source can simply outwait the creators of the ancient code, or fork.

A better question is if it was really the redesign as such or manpower that killed them. If you kill a huge migration project 80% into the project as many systems are already migrated you always leave a gigantic clusterfuck. Companies will commit resources to finish it, even if it's a depressing job with a result that might suck more than when you started. That was the case with KDE4, a ton of work had been committed on KDE4 ports of the applications, but the core wasn't working. And this is where a company

Good point... if you factor in Apple's iOS (UNIX-but-not-Linux based), it's pretty bad news on smartphones if you're not *nix based. iOS is healthy, Android is kicking butt. Everyone but Nokia in the non-Unix SymbianOS world has left, and Nokia is increasingly talking about MeeGo (which is pretty much just a Linux distro) as their future. Windows Mobile has been failing for a few years, to the point where most OEMs lost much interest, and MS had to replace it with their ZunePhone, er, iClone, er, Windows Ph

In many respects Linux is a 40 year old design, and surely it is not without its warts. Yet, its success in the form of Android speaks to its unrivaled flexibility and adaptability. True, many things that didn't really work well as files ended up modeled as streams instead (think of streaming a video rather than downloading it). Others ended up relying on OOP and/or relational models. Still others required concurrent and/or massively parallel processing or storage models. Linux and the free software ec